Crying Wolf: Media Disinformation and Death Squads in Occupied Iraq

Max Fuller, GlobalResearch.ca

November 11, 2005

Abstract

The
phenomenon of death squads operating in Iraq has become generally
accepted over recent months. However, in its treatment of the issue,
the mainstream media has zealously followed a line of attributing
extrajudicial killings to unaccountable Shia militias who have risen to
prominence with the electoral victory of Ibramhim Jafaari's Shia-led
government in January. The following article examines both the way in
which the information has been widely presented and whether that
presentation has any actual basis in fact. Concluding that the
attribution to Shia militias is unsustainable, the article considers
who the intellectual authors of these crimes against humanity are and
what purpose they serve in the context of the ongoing occupation of the
country.

Shortly
before dawn on 14 September 2005, just hours before a huge bomb
exploded in Baghdad killing 88 labourers, around 50 men in army
uniforms arrived at the village of Taji 16km north of Baghdad in
military vehicles, bearing military identification. After searching the
village, they seized 17 local men, described by one witness as
vegetable sellers, ice sellers and taxi drivers. Handcuffed and
blindfolded, the men were led from their homes before being shot in the
head in the main square (Newsday, Al Jazeera, Juan Cole).

Such
killings represent a pattern of violence as frightening as and perhaps
more systematic than the steady wave of bombings targeting civilians in
occupied Iraq. Whilst the pattern of death-squad-style executions is
broadly recognised, it remains badly understood and, in its
representation, deeply distorted.

The
appearance of death squads was first highlighted in May this year, when
over a 10-day period dozens of bodies were found casually disposed of
in rubbish dumps and vacant areas around Baghdad. All of the victims
had been handcuffed, blindfolded and shot in the head and many of them
also showed signs of having been brutally tortured. On 5 May 15 bodies
were discovered in an industrial area called Kasra-Wa-Atash and
subsequently identified as belonging to a group of farmers seized from
a Baghdad market. The bodies revealed such torture marks as broken skulls, burning, beatings and right eyeballs removed. Witnesses claimed the men had been arrested by members of the security forces (BBC, Guardian). Less than two weeks later, 15 more bodies were found at two sites (KUNA). According to the chairman
of the Sunni Waqf court, Adnan Muhammad Salman, the victims were Sunnis
who had been arrested at their homes or at mosques (ArabicNews.com).

The
evidence was sufficiently compelling for the Association of Muslim
Scholars (AMS), a leading Sunni organisation, to issue public
statements in which they accused the security forces attached to the
Ministry of the Interior as well as the Badr Brigade, the former armed
wing of the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), of
being behind the killings. They also accused the Ministry of the
Interior of conducting state terrorism (Financial Times).

Since
then, a steady stream of the victims of extrajudicial killings has
flowed through the Baghdad morgue. Characteristically, the victims'
hands are tied or handcuffed behind their backs and they have been
blindfolded. In most cases they also appear to have been whipped with a
cord, subjected to electric shocks or beaten with a blunt object and
shot to death, often with single bullets to the head. Yasser Salihee, a
journalist for Knight Ridder investigating the bodies, wrote that
eyewitnesses claimed many of the victims were seized by men wearing
commando uniforms in white Toyota Land Cruisers with police markings. (Knight Ridder). Salihee's last article was published on 27 June, three days after he was fatally shot by a US sniper at a routine checkpoint.

It
is impossible to know exactly how many people are being killed in this
way. Salihee reported that more than 30 examples occurred in less than
a week, while Faik Baqr, director of Baghdad's central morgue, states
that before the occupation of Iraq, the morgue handled 200 to 250
suspicious deaths a month, of which perhaps 16 had firearm injuries.
Now the figure is between 700 and 800, with some 500 firearm wounds (op. cit.).
The Independent's Robert Fisk adds that there are so many bodies that
human remains are stacked on top of each other and unidentified bodies
are rapidly disposed of (Robert Fisk).

The
killings have not been confined to Baghdad. For example, on 24 June six
farmers were taken from the village of Hashmiyat 15km west of Baquba by
men in army uniform; their decapitated bodies were found soon
afterwards a mile from their homes (Associated Press).
More recently, on 8 September, 18 people were abducted from the town of
Iskandriyah 40km south of the capital by men in National Guard Uniforms
and executed in isolated open land (Xinhuanet).
These few examples represent the tip of a rapidly expanding iceberg,
with the majority of extrajudicial-style killings seriously
under-investigated and underreported.

In
response to the accusations of police involvement, drawing on
eyewitness accounts, Iraq's new Ministry of the Interior claims that it
is easy to get hold of police uniforms and that the killings are the
work of 'insurgents' masquerading as security forces in order to create
sectarian divisions (BBC).
Such denials are echoed by US special advisor to the ministry Steven
Casteel, who has stated that, "The small numbers that we've
investigated we've found to be either rumor or innuendo" (Salihee, op. cit.).

Despite
such denials, few journalists have been able to dismiss what the
Observer's foreign editor Peter Beaumont describes as the
"extraordinary sense of impunity with which these abductions and
killings take place" as mere innuendo (Observer),
or the consistent eye-witness accounts of the kidnappers appearing with
expensive foreign equipment issued to the security forces, such as the
Toyota Land Cruisers and the Glock 9mm pistols, as simply rumour
(Salihee, op. cit.).
The Interior Ministry's explanation of large, heavily armed groups of
resistance fighters moving freely about the capital becomes even less
plausible when one considers that many of the killings took place
following the onset of Operation Lightning/Thunder in late May. This
divisional-size operation saw the deployment of 40,000 Iraqi troops,
who sealed Baghdad and installed 675 checkpoints around the city (Associated Press). Hundreds of arrests followed as the security forces began to "hunt down insurgents" (BBC).
According to the AMS, in one instance, on 13 July, dozens of Interior
Ministry commandos stormed several houses in northern Baghdad and
detained 13 people, before torturing and killing them in a nearby
apartment (Gulf Daily News).

However,
instead of placing the blame squarely on the apparatus of the new Iraqi
state, the mainstream media has almost exclusively chosen to shift the
emphasis away, resorting to a number of standardised literary devices.
The first device is to frame extrajudicial killings in the context of a
wider panoply of supposed retaliatory sectarian violence. For example,
Francis Curta of the Associated French Press writes that "A series of
tit-for-tat killings has raised sectarian tension to boiling points"
(eg. Mail&Guardian Online), Mohamad Bazzi writing for Newsday refers to a "wave of retaliatory killings" (Newsday),
and James Hider of the London Times believes that "the only certainty
is that once [the bodies] are identified, someone will want revenge" (Times Online).
The second device is to state or imply that the security forces are
closely associated with largely unaccountable Shia militias, especially
the Badr Brigade. For instance, Patrick Cockburn of the UK Independent
writes that "Some carrying out the attacks appear to belong to the
12,000-strong paramilitary police commandos", while, in almost the same
breath he adds that "Fear of Shia death squads, perhaps secretly
controlled by the Badr Brigade, the leading Shia militia, frightens the
Sunni" (Independent);
in a similar vein, the BBC claims that "Angry mourners at a funeral for
some of those killed said they had died at the hands of police and Shia
militiamen" (BBC).

Most
importantly, reports variously stress that the government, Interior
Ministry and police are under sectarian Shia control. Hence, Samir
Haddad, a correspondent for Islam Online, refers to the
"dominant-Shiite newly-formed security forces" (Islam Online),
the Chicago Tribune's Liz Sly states that Sunnis "accused Iraq's
security forces, now controlled by the Shiite-led government" (Chicago Tribune),
Tom Lasseter, writing for the Inquirer, claims that "Badr members have
gained unprecedented authority" and that the Interior Minister, who
controls the nation's police and commando forces, is a former Supreme
Council official with close ties to Badr' (Philadelphia Inquirer),the
Observer's Beaumont writes that "Accountability has also become more
opaque since the formation of the Shia-dominated government"(op. cit.),
the BBC's Richard Galpin states that the "Sunni community in particular
claims it is being targeted by the Shia-dominated police force" (BBC),
Anthony Loyd for the London Times talks of "allegations of extensive
extra-judicial killings of Sunnis by the Shia-dominated Iraqi security
forces" (Times Online)
and Sinan Salaheddin of the Associated Press, states "The grisly finds
have led Sunnis to believe that Shiite Muslims who dominate the
government and the Interior Ministry are waging a quiet, deadly
campaign against them" (eg. Seattle Post-Intelligencer).

Other
devices include mentioning the Interior Ministry's claims of insurgents
donning police or commando uniforms or implying that if the security
forces are involved in torture and murder it is a reflection of the
fact that it is composed of reconstituted members of the former state
who know only a culture of violence and intimidation; this is clearly
at odds with those reports that regard the security forces as entirely
Shia dominated. Wilder devices talk about security forces' frustration
or blame Zarqawi for attempting to inflame sectarian tensions. Whilst
all of these devices are employed in various combinations, notably
absent from every account is any serious examination of the new Iraqi
state or, assiduously avoided, the role of the occupying powers,
leaving the most thoughtful of journalist to wonder with Beaumont
whether the Iraqi state is "stumbling towards a policy of
institutionalised torture" or whether human-rights abuses are conducted
by "rogue elements" within the security apparatus (Salihee's
investigation represents the one exception, with the emphasis placed
firmly on the organs of the state, supported by solid primary evidence).

Police Commandos and Disinformation Brigades

An
instructive starting point for an examination of the prevailing media
consensus is to consider some of the forces of the Iraqi state most
closely associated with allegations of serious human rights abuses.

The
majority of accusations are general. Journalists refer to the police,
security forces, the National Guard or to poorly identified police
commandos, but specific accusations have been made against a unit known
as the Wolf Brigade. The identification of the Wolf Brigade with cases
of abduction, torture and execution in Baghdad was first made on 16
May, when Mothana Harith Al-Dari, a spokesman for the AMS, stated that
"The mass killings and the crackdown and detention campaigns in
north-eastern Baghdad over the past two days by members of the Iraqi
police or by an Interior Ministry special force, known as the Wolf
Brigade, are part of a state terror policy", in relation to the
discoveries of the victims of extrajudicial executions noted above (Islam Online).

Within
days a Knight Ridder journalist, Hannah Allam, had published under a
variety of titles an article about the Wolf Brigade, highlighting their
maverick tough-guy image and presenting their leader, who goes by the nom de guerre
of Abul Waleed, as a devout Shiite, "complete with a photo of Imam Ali
and religious chants programmed into his constantly ringing cell
phone." (Knight Ridder).
Allam informed readers that Waleed regarded the AMS as infidels and
tossed their accusations of torture and murder into the bin.
Additionally, readers learned that the unit was formed as the
brainchild of Waleed in October 2004, saw its first action in Mosul
after nearly two months' training with US forces, and is behind the
inhuman television programme Terrorists in the Grip of Justice, in which tortured detainees are forced to confess to a lurid array of crimes (Associated Press).
However, whilst belittling charges of horrendous human-rights
violations as "the usual complaints", Allam made no reference to the
Wolf Brigade being a special forces unit attached to the Interior
Ministry.

On 9 June rightwing US think tank the Council for Foreign Relations published a paper devoted to Iraqi militias (CFR), simultaneously repeated in the New York Times.
In a series of FAQ-type entries, the report reiterated many of Allam's
insights about the Wolf Brigade, as well as offering some additional
tidbits:

What is the Wolf Brigade?

The
most feared and effective commando unit in Iraq, experts say. Formed
last October by a former three-star Shiite general and SCIRI member who
goes by the nom de guerre Abu Walid, the Wolf Brigade is composed of
roughly 2,000 fighters, mostly young, poor Shiites from Sadr City.

However, the paper went further in emphasising the units' sectarian Shiite character, stating that "One of Badr's recent offshoots is a feared, elite commando unit linked to the Iraqi Interior Ministry called the Wolf Brigade", and spelling out the distinction between it and other, Sunni militia-style units.

Are there any Sunni-led commando units?

Yes.
At least one counterinsurgency unit is headed by a former officer of
Saddam Hussein's Baath Party. The Special Police Commandos, like the
Wolf Brigade, have a reputation for brutality, but the group is also
considered one of Iraq's most effective and well-disciplined
counterinsurgency units.

Those familiar with Peter Maas's article "The Way of the Commandos", published by The New York Times Magazine
just six weeks earlier, will recognise that, in fact, the Wolf Brigade
bears a striking similarity to the unit he identifies as the Special
Police Commandos. The Police Commandos, too, were formed in autumn 2004
and saw one of their first major commitments in Mosul in November; like
the Wolf Brigade, their leader also founded an unspeakably vile
television show called Terrorism in the Grip of Justice.

But
there are fundamental distinctions between these units as well. The
Police Commandos were founded on the initiative of then Interior
Minister Falah al-Naqib, the son of a former Iraqi Chief of Staff,
believed by many to have been a major CIA asset (National Review Online),
under the command of his uncle, an ex-Baathist, Sunni military
intelligence officer and CIA coup-plotter called Adnan Thabit. Its
recruits are drawn from former members of the special forces and
Republican Guard, with mixed ethnic and religious background (Washington Post),
while its chain of command is said to be largely Sunni. Most
importantly, the Police Commandos were formed under the experienced
tutelage and oversight of veteran US counterinsurgency fighters, and
from the outset conducted joint-force operations with elite and highly
secretive US special-forces units (Reuters, National Review Online).

A
key figure in the development of the Special Police Commandos was James
Steele, a former US Army special forces operative who cut his teeth in
Vietnam before moving on to direct the US military mission in El
Salvador at the height of that country's civil war. Steele was
responsible for selecting and training the small units (or death
squads) who were boasted to have inflicted 60% of the casualties caused
in that 'counterinsurgency' campaign (Manwaring, El Salvador at War, 1988, p 306-8). Principally, the tens of thousands of victims were civilians.

Another
US contributor was the same Steven Casteel who as the most senior US
advisor within the Interior Ministry brushed off serious and
well-substantiated accusations of appalling human right violations as
'rumor and innuendo'. Like Steele, Casteel gained considerable
experience in Latin America, in his case participating in the hunt for
the cocaine baron Pablo Escobar in Colombia's Drugs Wars of the 1990s,
as well as working alongside local forces in Peru and Bolivia (Maas op. cit.).
Whilst Casteel's background is said to be Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA), the operation against Escobar was a joint
intelligence effort, involving the CIA, DEA, Delta Force and a
top-secret military intelligence surveillance unit knows as Centra
Spike (Marihemp, SpecWarNet).
The operation had no impact on Colombia's position as the world's major
source of cocaine (which, incidentally or not, owed much to the CIA,
who had became heavily involved in the trade as part of their secret
funding of Nicaragua's Contra mercenary army; for a detailed account,
read the series Dark Alliance,
originally published by the San Jose Mercury News), with the centre of
gravity ultimately shifting to dozens of micro cartels (Houston Chronicle).
However, the operation did lead to the formation of a death squad known
as Los Pepes, which was to form the nucleus for Colombia's present
paramilitary death-squad umbrella organisation, the AUC, responsible
for over 80 percent of the country's most serious human-rights abuses (Colombia Journal).
Whilst no official connection was ever admitted, Los Pepes relied on
the intelligence data held in the fifth-floor steel vault at the US
Embassy in Bogota that served as the operation's nerve centre. Lists of
the death squad's victims rapidly came to mirror those of Escobar's
associates collated at the embassy headquarters (Cocaine.org, Cannabis News).

Casteel's
background is significant because this kind of intelligence-gathering
support role and the production of death lists are characteristic of US
involvement in counterinsurgency programs and constitute the underlying
thread in what can appear to be random, disjointed killing sprees.
Probably the best-attested example of such an operation is Indonesia
during the early years of the Suharto dictatorship, when CIA officers
provided the names of thousands of people, many of them members of the
Indonesian Communist Party, to the army, who dutifully slaughtered them
(Kathy Kadane). Similar cases can be made for the CIA supplying death lists and/or overseeing operations in Vietnam (OC Weekly), Guatemala, where death lists are known to have been compiled but were supposedly never acted upon (The Consortium),
and El Salvador, where former killers have come forward to describe
sharing desk space with US advisors who collected the 'intelligence'
from 'heavy interrogation' but were spared details of the subsequent
murders (Covert Action Quarterly). For an extensive list of countries in which the CIA has supported death squads, see the database compiled by Ralph McGehee (Serendipity).

Such
centrally planned genocides are entirely consistent with what is taking
place in Iraq today under the auspices of crackdowns like Operation
Lightning, which make use of so-called Rapid Intrusion Brigades to make
widespread, well orchestrated arrests (Financial Times).
It is also consistent with what little we know about the Special Police
Commandos, which was tailored to provide the Interior Ministry with a
special-forces strike capability (US Department of Defense).
In keeping with such a role, the Police Commando headquarters has
become the hub of a nationwide command, control, communications,
computer and intelligence operations centre, courtesy of the US (Defend America).
Interestingly, supplying a state-of-the-art communications network to
coordinate mass murder was part of the plan in Indonesia as well
(Pilger, The New Rulers of the World, p 30); it is doubtless common practice.

Finally, we know that by 30 January of this year, the Police Commandos had six functioning brigades and in early April the Al-Nimr (Tiger) Brigade took over from the Al-Dhib (Wolf) Brigade in Mosul (UNAMI).
Interestingly, one of the Police Commandos' first Brigade commanders
was a Shiite, apparently called Rashid al-Halafi, but Maas noted that
"he was regarded warily by other Shiites because he held senior
intelligence posts under Saddam Hussein".

Untangling the Web

Clearly,
the Wolf Brigade, though commonly treated in media reports as an
autonomous entity, is actually one component of the Interior Ministry's
Special Police Commandos. Abu Walid, identified occasionally as Brig.
Gen. Mohammed Qureishi, is the brigade commander, under overall command
of Adnan Thabit. Another figure linked with both the Wolf Brigade and
Police Commandos is Major General Rashid Flayyih, variously identified
as commander of the brigade or the whole formation. If he can be
identified with the brigade commander Rashid al-Halafi identified by
Maas, it can be surmised that he has either been promoted or is another
incarnation of Abu Walid.

Incredibly,
I have not been able to find a single report written since accusations
started to be made about the Wolf Brigade's involvement in the Baghdad
killings that makes their identification with the Police Commandos
clear, with journalists content to loosely refer to the unit as police
commandos, as though there might be all sorts of police commando units.
Though this might at first seem pedantic, the lack of clarity becomes
even more incredible in the case of the 10 bricklayers suffocated in
the back of a police van on 10 July (San Diego Union Tribune).
To my knowledge, this remains the only case in which members of the
security forces have been securely identified, with a survivor who had
feigned death able to provide first-hand testimony. The unit
responsible was the Wolf Brigade, but this information must be deduced
from a reference in one article to the victims being taken to a police
station at al Nisour Square (Knight Ridder) and Beaumont's mention that the Wolf Brigade is accused of running an interrogation centre as its Nissor Square headquarters (op. cit.).
It seems that a nebulous Wolf Brigade linked to Badr, full of vengeful
Shiite militiamen serves as a useful foil for allegations of 'state
terrorism', but that when the accusations are sufficiently
well-grounded, it is easier to keep it out of the spotlight for fear
that a pattern of gross and systematic violations of human rights might
start to emerge. The significance of this lies far beyond merely being
able to expose sloppy journalistic practices, but actually reveals key
characteristics of both the US imperial war machine and of the nature
of their current occupation of Iraq.

With
the finger of responsibility increasingly and inevitably pointing at
well-organised counterinsurgency units operating from the Interior
Ministry, one line of defence remains before intellectual authorship
must be placed at the hands of the occupying powers. Since the election
of 30 January and the transfer of office from the interim government of
Ayad Allawi to the transitional one of Ibrahim Jafari in May, the
mainstream media has unanimously chorused that power has fallen into
the hands of Iraq's Shia majority. Most specifically, it is repeatedly
claimed that the Interior Ministry and its security forces have come
under the control of SCIRI and even that the Badr Brigades now wield
considerable power within the ministry, with the new Interior Minister,
Bayan Jabor, described as a former Badr member. The manifestation of
this control lies in the policy of de-Baathification, a process that
was halted under the interim government of Ayad Allawi, but that was
considered fundamental by the incoming government. The policy was
actively opposed by the US administration, which feared that
experienced personnel (for which, read Washington's favourites) might
be lost, especially within the security forces and intelligence
apparatus (Washington Post).

According
to Firas al-Nakib, a legal advisor at the Interior Ministry and a
Sunni, 160 senior members of the Interior Ministry staff were rapidly
dismissed and many police commanders were replaced with Shiites loyal
to the Shiite bloc that won the elections (Knight Ridder).
Yet, after speaking with Jabor, General Flayyih was reported to be
reassured, with the former Badr member not only promising to support
the Police Commandos (Financial Times), but calling for their rapid and more extensive deployment (Los Angeles Times).
Flayyih's continuing tenure is particularly noteworthy, as, though a
Shiite himself, Flayyih was in charge of the suppression of the Shia
uprising in Nasiriya following the first Gulf War, and is, as such, a
frontrunner in any serious Shia-led policy of de-Baathification. Like
Flayyih, Adnan Thabit has retained a senior position, commanding all of
the Interior Ministry's special forces (Multi-National Force - Iraq).

The
issue of de-Baathification was recently addressed by Jabor, who
explained that the discharge of personnel was handled by a general
inspector and that recruitment was not influenced by sect (Al Mendhar).
Backing up his statements, he pointed out that many senior security
posts within the ministry were held by Sunnis, including that of deputy
minister for intelligence affairs (also leader of the Interior
Ministry's spy service), currently held by General Hussain Kamal.

In fact, the entire intelligence establishment is a creation of the Anglo-American secret services (Los Angeles Times), which began building at least as early as the beginning of the occupation (Detroit Free Press),
although it may be suspected that the process was conceived long
before. The new Iraqi establishment was staffed by long-term CIA
assets, such as General Mohammad Shahwani, who had been nurtured by the
CIA since the late 1980s (Asia Times Online) and became director of the new National Intelligence Service (the Mukhabarat).
Like Thabit and Flayyih, other old CIA hands, Shahwani had participated
in attempted coups against the government of Iraq. Further agents
(presumably existing intelligence assets for the most part) were
recruited from Iraq's main political groups, consisting of SCIRI, the
Dawa Party, the two main Kurdish parties, the Iraqi National Congress
and the Iraqi National Accord. These agents became the Collection,
Management and Analysis Directorate (CMAD), whose principal job was to
'turn raw intelligence into targets that could be used in operations' (Detroit Free Press, op. cit.).
Initially, 'operations' were carried out by a paramilitary unit
composed of militia from the five main parties, who, under the
supervision of US commanders, worked with US special forces to track
down 'insurgents' (Washington Post).
As the new Iraqi state apparatus developed, CMAD was split between the
ministries of Defence and Interior, with an 'elite corps' creamed off
to form the National Intelligence Service (Detroit Free Press, op. cit.).
To oversee all three bodies, the National Intelligence Coordination
Committee was established, headed, as National Security Advisor
(appointed in April 2004), by Mowaffak Rubaie. This'leading
Shiite moderate' had been a spokesman for the Dawa Party in the 1980s
when it was a serious terrorist organisation targeting Iraq, before
moving on to help coordinate the Iraqi opposition from London (Asia Times Online, op. cit.).
In London he worked with the Khoei Foundation, a pro-US charitable
organisation that has distributed money for the CIA and is linked with
the National Endowment for Democracy through Prime minister Jaafari's
advisor Laith Kuba, another long-term CIA asset (Village Voice).

These
new intelligence agencies supply the data for the Interior Ministry to
make arrests. A graphic and harrowing account of such arrests on 27
June 2004 was provided by UPI's P. Mitchell Prothero, in what he
describes as the "welcome arrival of frontier-style law enforcement".
Prothero described how local residents "seemed shocked" as their doors
were broken in and "men were dragged from their homes dishevelled and
screaming" by members of a SWAT team in central Baghdad. The raid had
been planned for months by General Kamal's intelligence agency within
the Interior Ministry and the names of more than 100 detainees were
checked against prepared lists (Washington Times).
Prothero witnessed many of those detainees "worked over" with metal
batons and lengths of hose in the backs of vans, but the most serious
abuse came later, within the Interior Ministry compound. On 29 June
members of the Oregon National Guard swept into the grounds of the
Interior Ministry and disarmed plain-clothed Iraqi policemen whom they
had observed beating bound and blindfolded prisoners (Oregonian).
The US soldiers began to administer first aid to the prisoners, who had
also been starved of food and water for three days; many were clearly
in a very serious condition. Steven Casteel was called to help deal
with the situation (Boston Globe).
After hours of negotiations, the soldiers unwillingly withdrew, leaving
the victims in the hands of their torturers. Perhaps their ultimate
fate will never be known, but as Casteel commented, "There's always a
pendulum between freedom and security".

Like
Thabit and Flayyih, Shahwani has retained his position under the
transitional government and continues to report directly to the CIA (Seattle Times).
Clearly, however, the purpose of stating or implying that unaccountable
militias are behind the extrajudicial executions and/or that sectarian
rivalries, especially Shia control of the Interior Ministry (which, as
Beaumont correctly points out, is the centre of the horror), are to
blame, is to distance the US from the almost unthinkable ongoing crimes
against humanity. Comparable disinformation strategies have been
employed in every counterinsurgency conflict with which the US has been
involved; it is known as establishing "plausible deniability". For
example, in Colombia, where the US as been deeply involved for decades,
paramilitary death squads are invariably described in the media as a
third force in the armed conflict, despite the fact that their victims
are typically civilian opponents of the government, their members are
drawn directly from serving members of the armed forces and they are
only able to operate with the active complicity of the army (Human Rights Watch: The “Sixth Division"). In reality, they function as part of a shadow state, which exists to implement policies that must remain unaccountable.

More
specifically, in the case of Iraq, this disinformation strategy not
only seems to be designed to mask the real intellectual authors of
genocidal crimes, but also, increasingly, appears to be directed
towards creating the very sectarian divisions that it hides behind.

Towards Balkanisation

In
every country where US-backed counter insurgency operations have taken
place with their attendant massacres and death squads, the conflict has
existed as one dimension in a strategy of neo-colonisation. In
Indonesia the communists were exterminated as part of the corporate
takeover of the economy, setting the stage for the globalisation of
Asia (Pilger, op. cit. p 15-44); in Colombia today,
brutal death-squad massacres and the assassination of popular leaders
exist to safeguard and extend the investments of foreign multinationals
in oil and mining as well as as part of an ongoing process of
privatisation.

In
this respect, Iraq is no different. Over and above the desire to
control Iraq's massive oil reserves, the country is being subjected to
enforced neo-liberal shock therapy, with wages slashed and the
extensive state sector rapidly offered up for sale. Corresponding with
this, is a catastrophic level of unemployment and the abandonment of
service provision for the majority of the population, in short a return
to typical Third World conditions (The New Standard).
Such a process of economic devastation is not only unpopular, it is
intolerable and there can be no doubt that most people in Iraq will
oppose cuts and sell-offs and demand a restoration of employment and
services. This is not a sectarian issue. To the extent to which
opposition becomes effective, the leaders and activists of the movement
are likely to become military targets for the state death squads,
whatever guise they take.

It
is hard to know exactly who the victims of the present wave of
assassinations are. Certainly they have included some trade union
leaders (Iraqi Federation of Workers' Trade Unions),
while in the period up to March 2004 more than 1000 leading
professionals and intellectuals had already been killed and thousands
more had fled the country (Al Jazeera).
Many of these people would have been members of the Baath party and
their murders are very likely to be part of the policy of
de-Baathification, which, insofar as it exists, has not targeted CIA
collaborators, but will undoubtedly have included those seen as
potential opponents of the new state. In passing, it is worth noting
that while thousands of former teachers have been sacked, thousands
more are being recruited from outside Iraq (Al Mendhar),
presumably because they are either cheaper to employ (denied by the
Iraqi government) or because they are more malleable to the new
educational regime, which works closely with the World Bank and
provides lucrative contracts to the Washington-based Creative
Associates Inc (Education News).
Iraq's 30,000 new teachers have received just five days' training and
must teach religion and a history that portrays Iraq's occupiers as
saviours, rather than the former "anti-Western propaganda" that might
have served Iraqis better. Other victims of the death squads may be
communists, the commentator Juan Cole noting that the Communist Party
is so alarmed by the course of events that it is considering going
underground; though he does not spell out the events that would force
the party into hiding, they are not difficult to surmise (Juan Cole).

A
further possibility, however, in addition to defeating a popularly
backed resistance, is that the monstrous intelligence nexus created by
the US in Iraq is orchestrating a strategy of ethnic cleansing as part
of an effort to partition a country that might otherwise remain a
regional pretender. Most of the military assaults have resulted in
substantial civilian displacement (eg Washington Times),
but, more worryingly, reports of families uprooting as the result of
perceived sectarian violence are starting to become common. For
example, in July, Mariam Fam of the Associated Press reported dozens of
Shiites abandoned their homes in a poor farming community on the edge
of Baghdad after receiving threats from Sunni militants that appeared
in the form of typewritten flyers scattered on streets and doorsteps;
prior to the Anglo-American invasion these people had shared their
poverty, labour, food and intermarried with their Sunni neighbours (North Country Times). Similarly, Hala Jaber writing for the Sunday Times
describes how Sunni families have fled Baghdad's majority-Shiite Iskan
neighbourhood after the killings of 22 young Sunni men, taken away by
men in police uniform who arrived in vehicles bearing police markings (Times Online).
A similar situation is described in Baghdad's Ghalaliya district, where
a spate of seemingly motiveless murders accelerated sharply over the
summer, leaving more than 30 people, Sunnis and Shiites, dead (Los Angeles Times).
The report claims that minority families there and elsewhere are
selling their homes and moving to areas where they are in the majority.
A similar picture is starting to emerge from other parts of the
country. Jaber notes that thousands of Shiites have fled the predominantly Sunni towns ofRamadi,
Falluja and Latafiya, while, according to Juan Cole, Sunnis are leaving
Iraq's deep south and Arabs, presumably of both denominations, are
being forced from the Kurdish district of Kirkuk (Juan Cole).

While
many in the mainstream media and Iraq's puppet government have argued
that insurgents linked to Abu Musab Zarqawi and al-Qaida are behind
much of the violence, deliberately hoping to inflame sectarian
divisions and incite a civil war (eg. News Day),
it is interesting to note how closely their dangerous schemes
correspond with the avowed aims of one of the most powerful figures in
present-day Iraq. Mowaffak Rubaie, the US-installed national security
advisor, promotes a vision that he calls "democratic regionalism", by
which Iraq would be dismembered into a loose federal system of four to
six distinct provinces, with at least two Shiite provinces to the south
and Baghdad as a separate district as well as the seat of federal
government, nominally responsible for national defence (Newsweek). Coincidentally, such a plan is well catered for by Iraq's new constitution (NPR), but would amount to the disintegration of the Iraqi state. A de facto civil war would undoubtedly advance this process.

The
parallels with the break up of Yugoslavia are obvious. Ed Joseph of the
highly establishment Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars
notes that "the likelihood of civil war increases if, after attacks
targeting a community, other members of the minority population flee",
in turn persecuting minorities in the area to which they fled (Los Angeles Times, op. cit.).
However, where he sees the situation in Iraq as comparable to Bosnia,
in many ways the pattern is closer to that of Kosovo, where widespread
ethnic cleansing against Serbs took places under the noses of NATO
observers after the withdrawal of Yugoslav forces (World Socialist Website).

In
view of mounting evidence of Anglo-American involvement in the bombing
campaigns targeting Iraqi civilians, notably the brief arrest of two
British SAS men found with a car packed with explosives (William Bowles),
it is worth speculating a little on the implementation of their wider
strategy. Discounting Al-Qaida and Zarqawi in Iraq as fabrications
designed for easy media consumption (Centre for Research on Globalisation),
we are left with a situation in which someone is targeting Shias,
mainly through the planting of bombs around mosques and at religious
ceremonies, and someone is targeting Sunnis, mainly through
extrajudicial executions carried out by parties that look a lot like
the police but have become linked with the Shiite Badr Brigade in the
popular imagination. It is impossible that the Iraqi resistance could
account for this pandemic of fratricidal violence, whatever Adnan
Thabit might say about insurgents in police uniforms. It is equally
impossible that SCIRI and the Badr Brigade could account for much of it
in a milieu dominated by CIA assets and US military forces. What is
possible is that both sides of the apparent sectarian violence are run
as part of a huge CIA-lead intelligence operation designed to split
Iraq at the seams. I tentatively suggest that the intelligence
apparatus at the Interior Ministry is contriving attacks on Sunnis and
that British and US special forces in conjunction with the intelligence
apparatus at the Iraqi Defence Ministry are fabricating insurgent
bombings of Shias. Overseeing the entire operation is the "cream" of
CMAD under the direction of top-level US intelligence asset Mowaffak
Rubaie, a man already experienced at participating in bombing
campaigns, undoubtedly working hand in glove with the CIA and the
National Security Council in the US.

False Flags, Semiotics and Vulgar Marxists

The
French theorist Jean Baudrillard famously once stated that the first
Gulf War did not take place. By this he did not mean that nothing
happened, but that its presentation in the media consisted of an
overwhelming barrage of the signs of War, which bore
essentially no relationship to the annihilation of a Third World army
by the most advanced military power in history. In short it was a
simulation of war. This was perhaps the most extreme example of what
Baudrilliard referred to as the "ecstacy of communication", that in our
Information Age, concepts spin at such a rate that their outlines
become lost and their original meanings are replaced with empty
alternatives.

Fifteen
years later, the same charges can be levelled against the recent Iraq
"War" and the country's subsequent occupation. Most importantly, I
believe that a process akin to that Baudrillard highlighted is being
actively employed to simulate a civil war in Iraq. False-flag
intelligence operations are aimed at sowing seeds of a sectarian strife
that was largely non-existent prior to the invasion. Thus, even many
Sunni Iraqis are coming to believe that the well-organised death squads
run from the CIA-controlled intelligence hub are actually the Badr
Brigade they often claim to be; and thus British SAS men in Arab
disguise plant bombs at Shia religious festivals to be blamed on
fanatical Wahabi Sunni "insurgents".

Whether
such tactics succeed in provoking further, autonomous acts of violence
directed against the civilian population is much less significant than
the impact they are able to exert within the media. This Anglo-American
intelligence operation acts as a factory churning out the signs
of Civil War: a "wave of tit-for-tat sectarian violence" and the
consequent ethnic cleansing. The signs are produced to be picked up by
the media and spun and spun until nothing is left but a nebulous Civil
War with no internal logic or structure, with the occupying forces as
powerless to intervene as they were in the Balkans while Iraq splits
into Rubiae's desired four to six autonomous provinces. Those few
journalists, like Yasser Salihee and Steven Vincent, who break the
mould and start to investigate the actual authorship of extrajudicial
killings themselves become victims.

When one former CIA operative candidly claimed that "Intelligence services are the heart and soul of a new country" (Washington Post)),
they were inadvertently expressing a position that Noam Chomsky might
call "vulgar Marxist". What they were actually confessing is that the
essence of a state is the organisation of violence as the ultimate
coercive measure and that the intelligence apparatus functions as its
brain. Little wonder then that the US is so closely involved with
intelligence services the world over, or that both coup d'etats
and savage repressions of sectors of the population deemed opposed to
US interests have emanated from the offices of these same services.

To
penetrate the media smokescreen of spontaneous, uncontrollable violence
and understand the role of intelligence operations in the creation of a
beholden, occupied client state or series of statelets is fundamental
to understanding the processes in Iraq today. It is also fundamental to
recognising that the presence of Anglo-American forces in Iraq does not
merely exacerbate the present violence; in Iraq we are the violence.

Max
Fuller is the author of "For Iraq, the Salvador Option Become Reality"
published by the Centre for Research on Globalisation. He can be
contacted at Max.Fuller@talktalk.net.

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